A
major goal of the Virginia Space Grant Consortium (VSGC) is to help
produce the engineers and scientists of the future. While opportunities
for careers in aerospace have expanded, the number of talented students
pursing degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics
(STEM) has declined. To encourage talented individuals to pursue
aerospace-related fields of study, the VSGC established four Scholarship
and Fellowship programs. The Graduate Research Fellowships are $5,000
awards for students enrolled at a Virginia Space Grant university
(College of William & Mary, Hampton University, Old Dominion
University, University of Virginia, and Virginia Tech) pursuing any
field of graduate study (Masters or Doctoral level) with aerospace
relevance.

Collin
McMillan works in the area of source code search and retrieval. His
work uses structural data from source code, such as function calls or
commit logs, in order to improve search in large projects or
repositories. One application of this work of direct relevance is to
projects that persist for years or decades. As new programmers enter
these projects, they need to find which source code artifacts
(functions, classes, etc.) relate to their tasks, such as the fixing of
bugs, the addition of features, etc.

Judith
Providence examines execution traces for the software development of
safety critical systems, another important problem for NASA. Her
research focuses on determining the similarity between execution traces
in a way that is orthogonal to natural language processing techniques
that apply to textual error description.

Jennifer
Thorne works on tactical runway configuration management, the end goal
of which is to provide a tool that will effectively and accurately
recommend the optimal runway configuration strategy to meet all
requirements of an airport over a certain time period. An automated
runway configuration management model that optimizes its configuration
choices to minimize delays in arrivals and departures will improve
efficiency at airports especially when applied to several airports
operating together in a metroplex. Such a model could help solve one of
the main sub-problems of air traffic management.